Madman Dan

An embittered Dan Rather strikes at the soft underbelly of CBS.

The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times, alleges that CBS violated Rather's contract by giving him insufficient airtime on 60 Minutes after he was ousted from the anchor seat at the CBS Evening News in March of 2005. It also claims that the company commissioned a biased investigation into the Texas National Guard controversy, resulting in a flawed report that "seriously damaged his reputation."

The lawsuit alleges that the company and its executives made Rather "a scapegoat" in an effort to "pacify the White House" after the infamous report was at least partially debunked by right-wing bloggers.

Actually, it was completely debunked. The memos were the story, and they were fake, printed in Times New Roman, a Microsoft font that wouldn't even exist until about two decades after the memos were supposedly created, using typographical elements that could've been done only with great difficulty, even on the era's most expensive, high-end equipment, nevermind a National Guard secretary's typewriter. They were so humiliatingly fake that even Michael Moore refused to get involved, that even Frank William Abignale, Jr. spoke up to denounce them. What Rather thinks "the White House" had to do with it is beyond imagination: Does he think widespread public disgust and his report having humiliated the network in front of the world wasn't enough? Has he been hanging out with my whacked out Congressman, Democrat Maurice Hinchey.

Either way, if Rather thinks the internal investigation is what damaged his reputation, he really has lost his mind. Of course, many of us suspected that the very first night he appeared on television to deny the forgeries, misrepresenting the problems with the documents and claiming that CBS had done their job, despite the very people CBS asked to verify the documents claiming they had warned CBS of their doubts or had been lied to by CBS. Then again, Rather blames CBS for his own statements, too:

Rather's lawsuit alleges that he was little more than a narrator in the Texas National Guard story because his superiors directed him to focus on other stories....The suit says the public apology Rather offered to viewers and to Bush on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 was written by a CBS corporate publicist, and that he delivered it "despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted."

Rather's protests that he was just a patsy might, potentially, have some merit, were he claiming that he was a fall guy for the fake memos, told to defend them and had no personal duty regarding their authenticity. (Instead, that might fall on Mary Mapes.)

That, however, is not his claim: Rather is alleging that he was forced to apologize for no good reason, and has, in fact, continued to state, four months after the announcement he'd be stepping down, that he believes the memos were real, seemingly arguing that since the creepy, Bush-obsessed Democrat who gave the memos to CBS couldn't identify his source (a mysterious woman he says called herself "Lucy Ramirez"), nobody could prove they were forgeries.

In other words, Dan Rather is suing CBS because he fervently insisted on systematically misrepresenting reality and, as a result, was not allowed to report the news anymore. It's so sad that it's beautiful.

Update: Ann Althouse:

Dan Rather's reputation had to do with the appearance that he was vouching for the stories he read on the air, that he was taking personal responsibility for their truth. He's suing CBS for allowing him to report a phony story....[H]is own actions, as he describes them, warrant the diminishment of his reputation. In which case, in asserting the basis for his lawsuit, he's diminishing his own reputation.

I feel like there should be a reference here to the Paradox of the Court, but, oh well. Beldar, on the other hand, wants tickets to the trial.

My first reaction upon reading this was to wonder whether the appropriate statute of limitations had already run. But I can't answer that question, because I can't tell from this story what type of claim Rather's purporting to make. I don't recall studying the tort of "intentional mishandling of a news story aftermath" in law school, but maybe I was sick that day.

My glee is tempered by my realization that this case is almost certainly going to go away before it gets to any good stuff..The law firm that Rather has retained, Chicago-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, is indeed a good firm. The complaint that Sonnenschein's New York office has filed on Dan Rather's behalf, however, is a nicely buffed and polished piece of garbage. The lawyers who wrote it appear to have been infected with Rather's own delusions...They allege that CBS was Rather's "fiduciary" - and I'm sorry, but that's so badly wrong as a matter of law that every one of the Sonnenschien lawyers whose name appears on this complaint ought to be sanctioned for making it (because when it comes to negotiating extensions of your employment contract, your employer is not your fiduciary but your adversary). Their tort claims against the CBS execs in their individual capacity don't even attempt to allege facts to show that they were acting outside their corporate employment capacities - making those another set of claims that are, in my judgment, so wrong as a matter of law as to be sanctionable. And the fraud claims consist of all the other claims repackaged along with an allegation that the defendants' bad acts were deliberate, and that the defendants fooled poor ol' Dan about their true and truly evil intentions for a really long time.

Do not misunderstand me to be saying that CBS did everything, or much of anything, even mostly right or in an even approximately timely fashion. They covered for Rather and his team for far too long, and the Thornburgh-Boccardi Panel was far too timid and equivocal in its findings. Rather and everyone else should have been publicly exposed, condemned, and fired for cause by CBS no later than September 15, 2004. And for trying to paper over Rather and his cohorts' fraud instead of simply calling it what it actually was, and for keeping Rather on the payroll instead of putting him on the street with all his "literally dozens of Emmy Awards" in a stack of cardboard boxes, CBS does, in a sense, very much "deserve" this lawsuit.

Yes, they should've, and yes, they do.

Crow Eaten

For a few weeks, I've been tied up in a maddening stock trade, a company called Accredited Home Mortgage (LEND). They had a deal to be acquired by another company called Lone Star, but when the subprime crisis hit, Lone Star wanted out. However, the details of the contract disalllowed this, LEND sued, and although their stock had dropped to about $6.50, a lot of people, including myself, bought in at that point on the likelyhood that the deal would eventually close successfully. The contract was for $15.10, I figured on a settlement around $12. The crazy part is that every time LEND issued a statement containing standard boilerplate language about the risks in their industry, critics cited it as LEND being of the opinion that it might go bankrupt.

When Lone Star tried to settle at $8.50, that was the tipoff that they knew how weak their hand was, and when LEND rejected, that they knew it, too. The stock skyrocketed. Nothing, however, seemed able to stop the Motley Fool's Bill Mann from writing this article last night once he saw how bad LEND's cash flow was.

In short, the market in which Accredited Home Lenders operates is eating its young. Its equity isn't worth $250 million, $250,000, or $2.50.

I put very low probabilities on Lone Star ponying up one red cent for Accredited Home Lenders' equity. This morning's results announcement clinches it. Why would Lone Star pay for something that's worthless?

Because they have a contract? No, I don't think so. The contract contains conditions for cancellation, including "material adverse changes" language. Of course, Accredited Home Lenders will argue -- as it should -- that there is specific language stating that decaying market conditions don't count as a "material adverse change" in the contract. And Lone Star will then say -- as it should -- "See you in court."

And somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Because a company whose "survival is in doubt" doesn't have the resources to mount a big legal battle. Lone Star can afford to be patient. Accredited Home Lenders? Not so much.

A few years from now, some plaintiff will argue on behalf of Accredited Home Lenders that Lone Star acted in bad faith, that the two had a contract, and that this contract prevented Accredited from seeking other sources of capital when it desperately needed them. Lone Star will then settle for a few cents on the dollar.

...It's like a game of chicken. Except that one side is in a car, while the other is riding an actual chicken.

This morning, the two companies agreed to complete the buyout at $11.75.

Rough morning for Bill Mann, what with the barking dog and all.

The Hitlerverse

James Taranto considers the story of old-timey liberal journalist Alan Cranston, who encountered some awkward pre-war self-censorship regarding a certain book, and decided to take action:

While I was doing my foreign correspondence work, I read Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." . . . There was no English-language version of it. When I quit journalism and came back to try to get involved in activities in the United States, one day in Macy's bookstore in New York I saw a display of "Mein Kampf," an English-language version, which I'd never seen before, which hadn't existed. I went over to look at it out of curiosity and as I picked it up, I knew it wasn't the real book. It was much thinner than the long book that I had read, which is about 350,000 words. So I bought it to see how come. And delving into it I found that it was a condensed version, and some of the things that would most upset Americans just weren't there as they were in the version I had read, the original, in German.

So I talked to an editor friend of mine in New York, a Hearst editor named Amster Spiro, and suggested that I write and we publish an anti-Nazi version of "Mein Kampf" that would be the real book and would awaken Americans to the peril Hitler posed for us and the rest of the world. . . . We proceeded to print in tabloid the version that I wrote, with a very lurid red cover showing Hitler carving up the world, and we sold it for ten cents on newsstands. It created quite a stir. Some Nazis went around knocking down newsstands that displayed it in St. Louis and the German part of New York and elsewhere in the country.

We sold half a million copies in ten days and were immediately sued by Hitler's agents on the grounds we had violated his copyright, which we had done. We had the theory that [though] he had copyrighted "Mein Kampf" in Austria, he had destroyed Austria with his army, so we said he destroyed his copyright at the same time. Well, that didn't stand up in court, and a Connecticut judge ruled in Hitler's favor. No damages were assessed, but we had to stop selling the book. We got what was called an injunction. But we did wake up a lot of Americans to the Nazi threat.

If you've ever wondered why, for example, some news outlets described the outrage over Farfour the Mouse as being only about his "calling children to martyrdom" against Israel (disgusting, but completely unsurprising) but completely ignored the fact that the show is dedicated to grooming children for the subjugation of all of human civilization to Sharia law (rather damaging to the standard leftist interpretation of world events), this is why. An editor or reporter simply felt it was their duty to delete the parts of reality that would really upset us.

Comforting, isn't it?

The good news is that with people's access to information increasing to something resembling infinity, the chances of these kind of stunts working is constantly approaching zero. Islamist leaders, for example, can't expect to give one speech in English to the media calling for diplomatic cooperation and another to their followers in Arabic calling for bloodshed with the same confidence that they used to: You never know who in the audience will translate it and post it online somewhere, which is why some governments are so eager to figure out new and inventive ways to control what their people can see online.

Of course, all of this depends on citizen participation. Eternal vigilance, etc, etc.

Planet Saving Stopped

You wouldn't know the BBC is supposed to be impartial to read their news releases, but apparently, it's an issue.

Planet Relief would have highlighted concerns about global warming and encouraged viewers to take part in a mass "switch-off" to save energy. Ricky Gervais and Graham Norton were among the celebrities mooted to take part.

However, it faced criticism from the BBC head of TV news, Peter Horrocks, and the Newsnight editor, Peter Barron, at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival 10 days ago amid concerns that it would breach the corporation's guidelines on impartiality.

Asked whether the BBC should campaign on issues such as climate change, Mr Horrocks told a session at the TV festival: "I absolutely don't think we should do that because it's not impartial. It's not our job to lead people and proselytise about it."

Barron added: "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet. I think there are a lot of people who think that, but it must be stopped."

Documentary maker Martin Durkin, whose film The Great Global Warming Swindle attracted a large number of complaints when it was shown on Channel 4, also criticised the programme idea.

"The thing that disturbs me most is that the BBC has such a leviathan position ... that if it decides that it is going to adopt climate change as a moral purpose, I have got a lot of trouble with that. I don't think it is the role of the BBC to spend my money on a moral purpose," he said.

However, BBCistas warn, people demanding fairness and realism shouldn't get cocky:

Now the BBC has abandoned plans for the environmental awareness day. But a BBC spokeswoman said it was "absolutely not" a result of the debate about impartiality.

"BBC1 aims to bring a mass audience to contemporary and relevant issues and this includes the topic of climate change," the BBC said.

"Our audiences tell us they are most receptive to documentary or factual-style programming as a means of learning about the issues surrounding this subject, and as part of this learning we have made the decision not to go proceed with the Planet Relief event.

The BBC is probably not the place to get "factual" programming about global warming, even when they attempt to deliver it. In fact, viewers have already figured this out:

The BBC's coverage of Al Gore's Live Earth concert in July proved a flop with viewers. It averaged just 2.7 million viewers across five hours from 5.30pm on BBC1, compared with an average of nearly 9 million for the Diana memorial concert a week earlier.

...and Diana passed away 10 years ago.

"This... Is my BOOMSTICK!"

The AFP runs a photograph of an Iraqi woman, clutching bullets that the AFP claims she claims hit her house.

Note "claims", because they're bullets that are still in their cartridges.

Not that you need to go further than that, but it's not American ammunition, either.

The real question, of course, is if the AFP just made it up, or if they were simply incompetent and didn't question the story of the woman, who was deliberately propagating the story.

To express his outrage, the Dissident Frogman, a French blogger, produces Basic Beginner's Bullet Crash Course 101, an instructional video for journalists. Totally worth watching, just for the creative fun.

Update: A comment about the video:

Pay special attention to the music in the second half of the Frogman's vid. THAT is what Iraq sounds like as far as I'm concerned. That's all that the locals who drove the buses around base on Al Asad listened to ALL. THE. TIME.

Heh.

Terrible Outcome

A sad, but not, at this point, surprising, statement regarding the Utah mine accident:

Six coal miners caught in a cave-in may never be found and could forever be lost to the still-quivering mountain, officials conceded Sunday, abandoning the optimism they've maintained publicly for nearly two weeks.

Relatives responded by accusing federal officials and the mine's owners of quitting on the rescue effort and leaving the men for dead.

"We feel that they've given up and that they are just waiting for the six miners to expire," said Sonny Olsen, a spokesman for the families, reading from a prepared statement as about 70 relatives of the trapped miners stood behind him.

The news marked a shift in tone in mine officials' assessments of the chances the men would be rescued, hopes they had maintained even after three rescuers were killed and six more hurt Thursday in another "bump" inside the mountain.

The families of the missing miners demanded that rescuers immediately begin drilling a 30-inch hole into which a rescue capsule could be lowered.

"We are here at the mercies of the officials in charge and their so-called experts. Precious time is being squandered here, and we do not have time to spare," Olsen said.

A rescue capsule was used in 2002 to pluck nine trapped miners from the flooded Quecreek mine in western Pennsylvania. But those miners were only about 230 feet below the surface, and the drilling took place on a gently rolling dairy farm. The Utah miners are believed to be more than 1,500 feet beneath the surface, with drillers having to work atop a steep sandstone cliff.

Also, at Quecreek, rescue workers heard tapping sounds hours after the miners became trapped, indicating at least some of them were alive. Work began on the rescue shaft later that day, and the whole ordeal was over in just over three days. At Crandall Canyon...[a]ll attempts to signal the miners have met with silence.

The reaction of the families is understandable, but I find it highly unlikely, at this point, that anybody is "waiting" for anything. As agonizing as that must be to confront for their loved ones, there is no evidence that anybody is or ever was alive down there, and, two weeks later, the efforts to reach them, while they'll doubtlessly be scrutinized and torn apart in hindsight (some of it certainly deserved), have been massive and admirable. That will probably get lost in the outrage, especially with the media's demonstrated lack of perspective.

I sympathized with Elvis Presley's alleged decision to shoot his television, when a reporter at a press conference demanded that the project engineer tell them which tools, specifically, the miners might use to tap and give signals, pressing him for answers like "well, they wouldn't have hammers on them at all times, of course" until Bob Murray finally ran up and snatched him up, politely explaining that they were kind of in the middle of a life-and-death situation and didn't have any more time to teach a nest of journalism majors the nuances of mine rescue protocol. The reporter made himself look like he'd pull firefighters right off the hoses for soundbites if he thought he could get away with it. Even more bizarre is the Washington Post's description of the cave-ins as "the mountain closing its wounds". (...and what does Arianna Huffington know about coal mining?)

I grew up in coal mining country, and received enough of an education on the subject to appreciate that America's coal mining industry isn't the kind of bloodbath it once was not so long ago, or, far worse, that China's is today. Energy is what makes advanced human civilization possible, and in our time, coal remains one of the best ways to get it. It's urgent that we learn from every tragedy like this to make our mines safer and more efficient. Still, no safety measure can lock out the ultimate fact that it's an extreme, unpredictable environment where accidents will, inevitably, happen, because it's not a place particularly friendly to human life. We shouldn't forget where our energy comes from, and who makes it possible. May those who lost their lives rest in peace.

The Coal Miners' Memorial statue and wall,
Herrin, Illinois.

Do Not Question The Source

...even when it's Russian state media:

News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.

The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.

Reuters has admitted that it took the images from Russian state television channel RTR and wrongly captioned them as file footage originating from the Arctic.

RTR had also used the footage to illustrate stories about the North Pole expedition, but it is thought as library footage, and it never claimed it was actually of the flag-planting.

The incident is doubly embarrassing for the agency since it follows a case in August last year in which it published an image by a freelancer of Israeli bombings in Lebanon that had been dramatised using photo manipulation, with the addition of smoke rising from allegedly burning buildings.

The incident is triply embarrassing for the agency since it follows related cases in which it published staged photographs and an image from the same freelancer who had Photoshopped additional flares into an image of an Israeli warplane, and then claimed they were missiles.

The incident is quadruply embarrassing for the agency since it follows a case several years ago in which they published images provided by a Palestinian activist group that seemed to show Rachel Corrie immediately "before" and "after" she was hit by an Israeli bulldozer, implying that the driver did it on purpose. The photos were published on the front page of the New York Times and numerous other papers around the world, despite the fact that the images clearly showed two totally different bulldozers with two different paint jobs in front of two different backgrounds in two different places with the sunlight at two different angles. The images were subsequently wiped from the Reuters website without explanation.

Really, the embarrassment may grow exponentially, because it becomes more and more obvious that nobody at Reuters has taken the hint and actually started looking at the images before they dump them onto the wire. (Via Knowledge is Power)

Meat Is Delicious Murder

Apparently, whatever culture the New York Times tries to reflect has reached the point where reporters psychoanalyze women who order steak on a date.

For the record, it does seem needlessly self-congratulatory when a woman "just orders a salad", as if she's making a point of proving she won't gain weight, or something. Obviously, you can order something excessive, but if you're invited to dinner, there's nothing wrong with eating dinner. Then again, I have a pretty strict rule against dating voluntary vegetarians, so maybe I'm not privy to the kind of neurotic behavior that warrants this article.

Restaurateurs and veterans of the dating scene say that for many women, meat is no longer murder. Instead, meat is strategy.

Completely insane.

Update: More self-absorption at the NYT, as women who take on so much stress that they destroy their lives get angry at women who don't.

This Is How Research Earmarks Are Spent

An experiment with blocks and pieces of cardboard leads to sweeping generalizations about national traits:

People from Western cultures such as the United States are particularly challenged in their ability to understand someone else's point of view because they are part of a culture that encourages individualism, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

In contrast, Chinese, who live in a society that encourages a collectivist attitude among its members, are much more adept at determining another person's perspective, according to a new study.

Actually, the study as described in the University of Chicago release provides no evidence that it is has anything to do with individualism or collectivism, and tests only small groups of Chinese and non-Asian Americans, providing no broader information about collectivist, individualist, or Western societies in general. It would appear, based on the information provided, that this is a completely baseless assertion. Oddly, it also seems like the kind of assertion that would be made by someone with a political agenda. However, let's take the claim at face value:

The study, though oversimplified compared to real life, was instructive. Keysar and his colleagues arranged two blocks on a table so participants could see both. However, a piece of cardboard obstructed the view of one block so a "director," sitting across from the participant, could only see one block.

When the director asked 20 American participants (none of Asian descent) to move a block, most [65%] were confused as to which block to move and did not take into account the director's perspective. Even though they could have deduced that, from the director's seat, only one block was on the table.

Most of the 20 Chinese participants, however, were not confused by the hidden block and knew exactly which block the director was referring to. While following directions was relatively simple for the Chinese, it took Americans twice as long to move a block.

"That strong, egocentric communication of Westerners was nonexistent when we looked at Chinese," Keysar said. "The Chinese were very much able to put themselves in the shoes of another when they were communicating."

Actually, according to the University release, it wasn't nonexistant: One Chinese guy had trouble, an issue of 5%. Of course, an alternate interpretation would be that the Chinese simply assumed that their director did not know what was on the other side of the barrier and did not bother to confirm the director's intentions before acting, although it seems some Americans also simply moved the wrong block (perhaps assuming that the director understood their perspective, much as is the case with other instructions we're commonly exposed to). In America, we have a particular saying about assumptions, and according to the original release, indeed, many of the Americans did specifically stop to ask which block the director meant. This whole thing seems to depend on a faulty value judgement: Assuming that you know what the person giving you instructions is thinking is not always a good thing. In fact, in some everyday industrial situations, it could lead to a potentially fatal accident.

Collectivist societies, such as the Chinese, place more value on the needs of the group and less on the autonomy of the individual. In these societies, understanding other peoples' experiences is a more critical social skill than it is among typically more individualist Americans.

"Of course, these are very gross oversimplifications," said Keysar. "Even in America, you can find collectivist societies. For example, working class people tend to be much more collective."

What an odd sentiment: Who, exactly, constitutes the working class for Keysar's purposes, and what makes them collective? Union membership? Income limits? Large families? Isn't this statement alone so broad that it virtually nullifies the premise? What "class" did the experiment's participants belong to? What about genetics, linguistic nuance? Indeed, Keysar admits in the press release that the ability to "understand the experiences of others" is a universal human trait, and says only that he feels it's less strongly emphasized in the West. While this is valid assertion, it's so broad as to make it irresponsible to pretend you can draw conclusions from these results, gathered from a sample group so small that it could easily be a statistical accident.

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, what leads Keysar to believe there's a correlation between "the needs of the group" and acting on a presumed superior (the director)'s command? If this trait is supposed to be helpful in leading to mutual/communal benefits, it has not turned out that way in China, where three hundred million people lack safe drinking water, facing a largely backwards, medieval economy that is plagued by startling consumer and worker safety hazards. This recently culminated in the state execution of the head of a government food and drug watchdog agency, presumably by people who Keysar can show were able to understand his point of view very well. Maoism, intended to be the ultimate manifestation of Chinese collectivism as a way out of this backwards feudalism, led to the starvation deaths of tens of millions of people, despite being ostensibly based on cooperative efforts. If, in fact, the Chinese had an innate cultural tendency to recognize each other's needs and objectives, they would presumably be able to avert this, rather than forming armies to impose it.

Whatever trait Keysar believes he's identified has left millions of peasants living miserable, third world lives, and as a consequence of their culture placing "less value" on "individual autonomy" and more on the "needs of the group" as described by the researchers, they continue to suffer abuses at the hands of their rulers that Western individualist philosophies have actively condemned for many generations now. Much of this is little different than the experiences of the West's early medieval peasants, who also engaged in various types of communal agriculture as a means of protecting themselves from their environment, but who eventually got over it, building cities and moving back out of the dark age. It is not at all cynical or unreasonable to suggest that the tendency being demonstrated is not, in fact, "collectivism", but submission to a historical command-and-control system that has kept them in poverty but oriented their efforts and perceptions around the needs of those placed in positions of authority, a scenario supported by the recent article about Japan's problems implementing jury trials. The difference is that while Japan's leadership has, for the most part, proven benevolent and capitalistic, China's has driven them into the ground. Today, China, too, seeks to emulate the West, building gritty capitalist enclaves in the hope of finding some shred of prosperity in a society where 40 million live in caves and the children of farm families are fleeing the collective farms which cannot offer them a future, because it turns out that cooperative labor is less useful to human prosperity than ambition and the infrastructure to support it.

To call Keysar's reported interpretation of the study a "gross oversimplification" is a happily euphemistic description of a series of unsupportable contentions, contentions so politically charged that they could be described as propagandism. Chinese collectivism, like many similar movements worldwide, sprang from fear of starvation, and the society that resulted was hardly utopian. There's a hard ceiling to how far collectivist thinking can take a civilization before bureaucrophilia takes over and cripples progress, especially when the needs and expectations of the individuals begin to exceed the comprehension of the lowest common denominators. Our liberty allows individuals with vision to exceed the collective average, which is why America has so far proven the most successful economic and technological superpower in human history, two achievements which require a great deal of cooperation between members of the society, cooperation which we engage in voluntarily rather than at the command of a village headman, emperor, or committee.

Then again, who needs thousands of years of accumulated evidence, when you have a few dozen guys playing with blocks? Apparently, it's more "instructive". Just ask the media, which hasn't hesitated to cite this simple experiment as evidence of the superiority of collectivism:

China Daily - Study: Americans don't understand others
MSNBC - Americans can't step into shoes of others
University of Chicago Chronicle - America's individualist culture influences the ability to view others' perspectives
New Scientist - Self-centered cultures narrow your viewpoint

Likewise, here's one of the people thus instructed:

FINALLY, an Article that condenses what I've held to be the crux of the 'Major Problems' Americans have in Understanding the World in which they live:

Perspective!

And not only Internationally either: but differences in Perspective is at the root of Racial Relations in this country as well.

You can even run this 'Differing In Perspective' idea between Men & Women!

Intended, or not, but this Issue was at the crux of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". After all, Hobbits believed that they were Middle Earth's greatest thing since sliced bread .... as too did Elves, Men, and even dwarves. But in the end, the Enemy (Sauron and his minions) could not be adequately addressed until those Groups WENT BEYOND their Narrow PERSPECTIVES and reached out towards one another, is that not correct?

See. That's why I ALWAYS encourage Young People to go to college; because this is one opportunity for a person to escape from the parochial upbringing of their childhood and expand one's Perspective about another's gender, country, Race, political proclivities, and even Religious Beliefs. In fact, I owe MOST of my current Perspectives re how I perceive the world .... back to my leaving my small Ohio Hometown and attending a 4 year college (Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio ~ a predominately Black University). For had I not attended a Black University at the tender age of 18 .... I probably would have reached adulthood and had a developed 'mind set' comparable to that of Uncle Thomas, Aunty Rice and Step N'Fetchit Powell! : )

See. A 'Narrow Perspective' severely limits one's ability to think 'outside the box'. And Societly speaking, this is of a far greater danger than mere attitudes of prejudice or hate ~ because by Limiting Our Perspectives we can't even begin to THINK in ways to Resolve the critical Issues facing Mankind in the Twenty-first Century....

And lawd knows when it comes to the NEED for some kind of National Health Insurance; or Immigration; or even Quality of Life Issues?????

Someone has found complete vindication of their worldview in this, while giving the claims made therein absolutely no context whatsoever.

To make claims about entire cultural social structures that have evolved over millenia based on what happens when a few dozen people are given small objects to play with would be like Stephen Hawking demonstrating black holes by pulling the stopper out of a bathtub. (Via Knowledge is Power)

Poking The Bear

Michael Moore tries to go to war with CNN, CNN fisks him.

Sure, it feels like cheering for a 'bum fight', but still.

Update: Moore attacks, CNN responds, Moore suddenly wants a truce. It must be pretty sad to hinge your entire existence on arguments that don't stand up to cursory examination.

Using Your Own Words

Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir issues a press release. Tim Blair publishes this press release in the newspaper he works for.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Islamic political party working to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate within the Muslim world.

For some reason, Islamists are unhappy about this. Apparently, what's said in a press release isn't intended for publication, or something along those lines.

You may remember the "peaceful" group's insane decision to host a Global Caliphate Conference, a disturbing promotional video for which can be seen here.

One Call
One Ummah
One Day
One War
One Peace
One Struggle
One Goal
One Voice

Ist deja vu, ja?

An Unfortunate Series of Non-Events

I don't watch Keith Olbermann's show much, because although he periodically makes a good joke or two, as a general rule, it has about as much substance as The O'Reilly Factor, and is almost as loud-mouthed and creepy, thereby crashing the odds of it being worth my time to tune in.

However, the little that I've seen recently seems to revolve around his apparent belief that we should not concern ourselves with the Islamists who daily plot to kill us, because we seem to keep arresting blatantly incompetent terrorists.

Unfortunately, it's not really that simple, as this logically means we either aren't arresting the competent ones, who are obviously out there, since there are successful, fatal terror attacks going on worldwide, around the clock, or that it doesn't take any particular competence to successfully kill large numbers of people. Certainly, the 9/11 plot would have seemed comical and outlandish had we stopped it in advance, and the hijackers themselves, hanging out at strip clubs, wouldn't have seemed like the most threatening characters. It was because they killed thousands of people that they are taken seriously.

Personally, I think you're going to consistently find most terrorists are idiots: They're blowing themselves up to punish more successful civilizations for decadence, in the name of a God who they believe will give them 72 virgins in a land of milk and honey. To not see a problem with this pretty much puts a cap on your average Islamist suicide bomber's critical thinking skills.

In any case, now, Keith Olbermann manages to earn himself one of his own "Worst Person In The World" prizes by interviewing Larry Johnson on the London carbomb plots. Johnson, a former CIA officer, not only ignores the concensus of a number of experts that a 50-gallon fuel bomb is quite dangerous, but is backed up by Olbermann, who refers to the bomb as "half a tank of gas and some propane and an old cellphone", acting as though the idea of 50 gallons of gasoline and propane being dangerously explosive is absurd.

According to the CDC, a single cup of gasoline, in the right conditions, can provide the equivalent explosive power of five pounds of dynamite, and if Johnson believes that propane isn't a dangerous explosive, he is completely out of his mind. In 2004, leaks from a propane truck shredded the tractor trailer, blowing out windows across the street, hurtling two men standing nearby off their feet, and dropping pieces of the trailer 20 yards away. In fact, fatalities and maimings from the mishandling of propane in home and camping situations are just not all that uncommon. Johnson even ignores that this device was packed with somewhere around twenty boxes of roofing nails, intended as shrapnel to brutalize as many as possible in and around the crowded Tiger Tiger nightclub, claiming it would only do "a lot of damage to the interior of the car".

Johnson, apparently unaware that the cars were quite old, finally declares the perpetrators "yuppy terrorists who can afford a Mercedes", and joins Olbermann in a condemnation of the Coalition presence in Iraq, claiming these plots prove we need to pull out, because it will, somehow, improve things. (Which is it? Are the attacks insignificant or they should they affect foreign policy?)

There are a few other problems with Johnson, including his book, "The Declining Terrorist Threat", which was ironically published just a few months before September 11th, and his claim earlier in the same day as the Olbermann interview that the bomb was actually a molotov cocktail with a cloth fuse. One has to question if Johnson actually has a clue at all.

The sad new development, of course, is that now there's a third attack, staged on Glasgow's international airport, at a time when it was likely full of schoolchildren preparing to travel for summer vacation, with one of the car's occupants bursting into flames, and the other engaging in a fistfight with police, screaming "Allah! Allah!" Had it not been for the airport's reinforced security barriers, installed in spite of Johnson's warnings of the declining threat, the Jeep would've gone right on in. That, like the devices in London being detected, is really a matter of luck and good security strategies, not the insignificance of the terrorists: Terrorists who fail but escape can learn from their mistakes, get better, and try it again. Terrorists who are shot to death or spend the rest of their lives in prison cells cannot.

It's certainly possible to exaggerate the threat of Islamist terorrism: We are not all going to die, and none of us occupy a position where we're even likely to die at this time, including troops in Iraq. However, we are, as a matter of objective fact, at war with Islamism, a war that the Islamists have chosen to prosecute, and some of us are going to die. It will continue to happen if we leave Iraq, it will absolutely continue to happen if we do not fight back, and it will continue until the Islamists attain their one and only policy goal, which is the global dominance of Islamic law.

I don't know why people like Olbermann and Johnson are obsessed with the idea that countering this means letting "fear" rule our lives: Maybe it's just because they're afraid, but it's not something to be afraid of. Nobody is saying not to fly, but some inherently fearful people are afraid to anyway. Terrorism and the war with Islamism is simply something that's real, and that has to be dealt with.

Alternately, maybe it's because the reality so vastly contradicts the leftist worldview that they feel the need to distort it to protect their psychological status quo. Just ask a Daily Kos reader:

One wonders if this is a CIA operation to send a message to Brown not to "go soft" on the Cheney view of total war. Considering the known things that have been happening in the world since Bush seized power, it's hard not to view everything through the prism of phantasmagoric Hollywood-style secret plots. The only thing we've been missing are aliens and/or time travelers.

Actually, it's quite easy to avoid phantasmagoric Hollywood-style secret plot, provided you're willing to look at things as they are, rather than trying to find a way to make them into what you wish them to be.

Big Islam

an unkind review for an HBO special, "Hot House", on Palestinian prisoners held by Israel:

New York Times carries a review of a film called "Hot House" that goes inside Israeli prisons and examines the lives of Palestinian prisoners. We're not recommending the film or the review. But we do want to share our feelings with you about the beaming female face that adorns the article.

The film is produced by HBO. So it's presumably HBO's publicity department that was responsible for creating and distributing a glamor-style photograph of a smiling, contented-looking young woman in her twenties to promote the movie.

That female is our child's murderer. She was sentenced to sixteen life sentences or 320 years which she is serving in an Israeli jail. Fifteen people were killed and more than a hundred maimed and injured by the actions of this attractive person and her associates.

There does seem to be a certain disconnect in priorities there, yes.

Malka Roth, the daughter, had written a message on her cellphone with magic marker, in Hebrew, reminding her not to speak badly of others. The Hamas terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, on the other hand, dropped off a suicide bomber, then went back to her job as a newscaster to report on the mayhem, and later publicly declared she wasn't sorry for the killing, which included quite a few children.

The Problem With The Press

The scary thing about stories like this is that for every completely bogus story the media gets caught passing along as fact without first checking it for authenticity (and there have been more than enough), you know there are ten that we'll never know about and instead walk around believing. You'd think that wire services would check their sources thoroughly before publishing a claim that twenty decapitated bodies were found in a rather volatile part of the world, wouldn't you? The amount of care taken is surely directly proportional to the sensationalism of the claim and the possible consequences of propagating it, right?

Of course, that's no more true now than it was during Hurricane Katrina, when stories of raped babies and such ran rampant through the breathless media. The bigger the falsehood, the more likely we are to believe it, because it seems so improbable that it would've gotten past the imagined checks and balances of the press, a presumed network of educated experts and grizzled editors with years of field experience, unchallenged and untested. Indymedia types complain that "big media" parrots whatever the government tells them unquestioningly, but they seem not to realize that the real problem is that big media parrots whatever they're told, period, because they don't seem to care enough (or know enough about the subject matter) to investigate reports properly.

The question is, will we ever see the retractions, corrections and apologies for this failure that we like to pretend are normally printed when this sort of thing happens? (Via Instapundit)

Your Top Concern

The Immigration Bill has been slain again:

The Senate resoundingly defeated a bill yesterday that would have overhauled the nation's immigration laws for the first time in two decades, crushing the chances of settling the contentious issue in the next few years.

Notice the not-so-subtle bias in the phrasing of that opening paragraph. "Oh no! It would've been overhauled for the first time in decades, now it'll never be settled!"

The 46-53 rout was 14 votes short of the 60 needed to end the debate and move the bill forward....About two-thirds of the Senate's Republicans joined almost a third of the Democrats to kill the bill, which had been carefully constructed to appeal to both parties but also drew bipartisan opposition.

"What occurred today is fairly final," said Sen. Mel Martinez , a Florida Republican who was a member of the coalition behind the bill. The Cuban-born Martinez spoke of his deep disappointment and that of people "who share my background as an immigrant to this country, many of whom were looking to this effort as a way to improve their lives."

Martinez is Cuban. His background "as an immigrant to this country", welcomed legally to our country as a merciful indulgence, is not shared by Mexicans.

Brace for bias:

The Senate's failure to address one of the nation's most pressing domestic issues means businesses and farms will probably struggle to find low-wage employees, the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants will retreat deeper into the shadows and immigrants will continue to cross the southern border. As these problems escalate, cities and states will come under pressure to come up with their own solutions to a national problem.

What is this much opinion doing in a hard news story? Seriously: If illegal immigrants continue to cross the southern border, then businesses and farms will, by definition, have less of a problem finding low wage employees. That's rather the point, and if nothing has changed, why would they go "deeper into the shadows"?

An unusually downbeat Bush expressed his dismay and made it clear that he would urge Congress to move on to other issues, including energy and health care. "Legal immigration is one of the top concerns of the American people and Congress's failure to act on it is a disappointment," he said during a visit to the Naval War College in Rhode Island.

The American people, by and large, are relieved they didn't pass this nonsense.

Ultimate spin:

Democrats painted the outcome as a defeat for the American people. "The big winner today was obstruction," said Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had wrangled repeatedly with opponents on the Senate floor. "The big winner today was a status quo that amounts to silent amnesty."

"Silent amnesty"? Good Lord, I should write an immigration bill.

Individual Site Jihad

Australian public television show Media Watch attacks blogger Tim Blair with the help of an Islamist website. The ABC justifies refusing to cover the vile racism and calls for Islamist rule at the site by saying they don't "make comment on individual sites"...

Except, of course, Blair's.

"OH NO! THERE'S A BLAST UP AHEAD!"

Islamist militants murdered a half-dozen United Nations peacekeepers the other day.

FOX News managed to say yesterday that "the convoy hit a blast".

Beg pardon, but I'm quite sure it was more a matter of the blast hitting them. This was a rather inappropriate place for passive language.

Official Bias

After finally acknowledging that not only are they biased, but they know it, an absolutely astounding gaffe from the BBC:

Politicians reacted in disbelief to the revelation that for over two hours yesterday, the BBC News website carried a request for people in Iraq to report on troop movements.

The request was removed from the website after it sparked furious protests that the corporation was endangering the lives of British servicemen and women.

Last night the BBC confirmed the wording of the request was: "Are you in Iraq? Have you seen any troop movements? If you have any information you would like to share with the BBC, you can do so using the form below."

The article continues: "A spokesman was unable to offer a detailed explanation of why anyone at the BBC should be seeking such information."

British taxes pay for this.

Nothing To See Here, Move Along

Why is the media ignoring the Islamist response to Salman Rushdie's knighthood?

Update: Mark Steyn:

It’s slightly depressing to read that Her Majesty’s Government were entirely taken aback by the hostile Muslim reaction to their decision to knight Salman Rushdie. One assumed they had factored into their calculations at least a bit of pro forma Death-to-the-Great-Satan prancing in the livelier quartiers of Pakistan - or even, with classic Brit cynicism, figured that enraging hundreds of millions of Muslims over an imperial bauble was a cheap way to look courageous and tough and determined after the recent humiliations inflicted on the Royal Navy.

But no: the whole burning-effigies-of-the-Queen routine took them completely by surprise. It really is impossible to exaggerate the depths of self-delusion within which the multiculti bien pensants exist.

Christopher Hitchens:

The acceptance of an honor by a distinguished ex-Muslim writer, who exercised his freedom to abandon his faith and thus courts a death sentence for apostasy in any case, came shortly after the remaining minarets of the Askariya shrine in Samarra were brought down in shards. You will recall that the dome itself was devastated by an explosion more than a year ago-an outrage described in one leading newspaper as the work of "Sunni insurgents," the soft name for al-Qaida. But what does "Rage Boy" have to say about this appalling desecration of a Muslim holy place? What resolutions were introduced into the "parliament" of Pakistan, denouncing such shameful profanity? You already know the answer to those questions. The lives of Shiite Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Christians-to say nothing of atheists or secularists-are considered by Sunni militants to be of little or no account. And yet they accuse those who criticize them of bigotry! And many people are so anxious to pre-empt this accusation that they ventriloquize the reactions of Sunni mobs as if they were the vox populi, all the while muttering that we must take care not to offend such supersensitive people.

We may have to put up with the Rage Boys of the world, but we ought not to do their work for them, and we must not cry before we have been hurt. In front of me is a copy of this week's Economist, which states that Rushdie's 1989 death warrant was "punishment for the book's unflattering depiction of the Prophet Muhammad." There is no direct depiction of the prophet in this work of fiction, and the reverie about his many wives occurs in the dream of a madman. Nobody in Ayatollah Khomeini's circle could possibly have read the book for him before he issued a fatwah, which made it dangerous to possess. Yet on that occasion, the bookstore chains of America pulled The Satanic Verses from their shelves, just as Borders shamefully pulled Free Inquiry (a magazine for which I write) after it reproduced the Danish cartoons. Rage Boy keenly looks forward to anger, while we worriedly anticipate trouble, and fret about etiquette, and prepare the next retreat. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean living at the pleasure of Rage Boy, and that I am not prepared to do.

Wisdom.

Terror TV

When Palestinian terrorists used UN ambulances as a cover for their escape, the media largely let it go. When they pretend to be reporters? Well, that just crosses the line!